Tremendous changes have been occurring in the Internet that influence our everyday lives. For example, in today's society, one of the first activities that a user might perform during their day is to turn on their computers to communicate with friends, co-workers, family, as well as to read news, and/or search for various information. In fact, today, many of a person's social activities are now being conducted over the Internet.
Thus, many people are looking to the Internet to provide them with richer, fuller content that might include live tutorials, movies, music, and yes, even richer advertisements. Many people today have identified advertisements to not only be entertaining, but educational and informative. However, when an advertisement is displayed along with content in an unrelated manner, such advertisements might actually turn out to be distracting to the user. Further, such unrelated advertisements might not be selected or clicked on by a user, providing little or no revenue to the advertiser.
One such location for displaying advertisements is typically within a web page that is displayed as a result of a user search query. Various commercial web search engines often show results to a search query along with advertisements that have been selected based in part on the various ranking schemes. One such criteria for selecting which advertisements are to be displayed has been based on a historical Click-Through Rate or CTR. Briefly, a CTR is a way of measuring a success of an online advertisement based on historical data for a given advertisement. CTR is often defined as a “number of clicks” divided by a “number of times the advertisement was delivered” (impressions) for viewing. Because this definition fails to account for a particular person clicking on the same advertisement multiple times, another definition for CTR is sometimes used, where CTR is defined as the “number of persons” who clicked a particular advertisement divided by the “number of impressions.” In either instance, use of CTR remains a common mechanism for selecting advertisements for display.
However, where an advertisement is new, such historical CTR data might not be available. Similarly, there might also not be CTR data available for all possible search query request—advertisement combinations. Thus, for a variety of reasons, historical CTR data might be unavailable, and/or otherwise incomplete for a given search query request—advertisement combination. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.